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Civil Society Covenant Framework Consultation: joint response from NPC and The Future Governance Forum

Introduction

Civil society is essential to delivering the government’s mission-driven agenda. Civil society organisations deliver essential public services, have unique insights into the needs of communities, and can provide real-time feedback on the impact of government decision-making on the ground. The Civil Society Covenant presents an opportunity to create the conditions needed to enable meaningful partnership between government and civil society.

Any approach to working with civil society needs to acknowledge the multiple roles it plays, and multiple forms it takes. Civil society organisations vary from small groups of volunteers to multi-national organisations, and include charities, community groups, social enterprises, philanthropists, social investors, and others. The work that these organisations do is equally varied, including advocacy, social entrepreneurship, public service delivery, and delivery of essential services and support that the state doesn’t provide.

All of these goals and parts of the social impact sector play an important role in empowering communities and government to tackle their shared challenges. Our response focuses on how engagement between government and civil society can be improved, but we acknowledge the essential role of civil society in delivering much needed services and advocating for marginalised and disadvantaged groups in our society outside of its relationship with government.

We welcome the consultation’s focus on barriers and enablers to meaningful collaboration, and the role of civil society in finding innovative solutions to social challenges. Government and civil society should always have a shared purpose – to make the UK a better place. In this response, we set out practical mechanisms to change how civil society works with government to tackle deep-seated challenges.

Given the current economic context, these mechanisms do not involve significant financial investment. There are other steps that could be taken to create more capacity in civil society to engage with government through investment, tax incentives, VCSE infrastructure, etc., but we have focused on the means available to government through changing and adapting internal approaches and processes.

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Principles alone are not enough

We support the four principles set out in the draft Civil Society Covenant Framework, but do not think that principles alone are sufficient to drive real change in the relationship between Government and civil society. Without practical mechanisms to underpin these principles, the Covenant will not shift the behaviour and attitudes of either civil servants or civil society. This behaviour shift is essential if we want to see effective collaboration to tackle social issues.

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Engagement needs to enable meaningful partnerships

The government is committed to a mission-driven approach, which requires a more collaborative approach to shared accountability. The government sets the vision for change, but it is not achieved by government alone; rather through collective actions across sectors and industries.

On this basis, engagement with civil society must avoid an approach that is solely asking civil society to provide advice. There are various topics about which civil society can offer specific insights. The approach outlined below can be applied to various challenges as the needs and priorities of government evolve, but immediate opportunities for civil society to work in partnership with government include:

  • Gathering intelligence and information on communities and how policies can effectively support them
  • Identifying innovative new practices and approaches
  • Highlighting opportunities to improve procurement practices
  • Highlighting specific sector-wide funding priorities

A strong approach to partnership working will strengthen government decision making, and our recommendations are intended to suggest mechanisms through which robust discussions and partnerships can be established to tackle any topic.

We know what good looks and feels like. Working relationships between organisations that are open, honest, reciprocal, capable of being both relational and transactional, adaptable, and constructively challenging. But how you get there, consistently and at a scale necessary for national government activity, is harder to codify.

The civil service’s hesitancy to engage can be rooted in a fear of information leaking or losing control of the narrative. There is always risk, but it is worth the benefit of having civil society input and expertise in difficult policy areas. The whole system needs to better enable civil servants and politicians to cope with differences of opinion.

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Mechanisms to enable partnership working

Short-term options

While there needs to be deeper change to create the conditions for partnership working, there are some things that government could do that would signal its intent to work more meaningfully with civil society. Additionally, these mechanisms would provide a means for essential knowledge and information to flow between government departments and civil society.

  • An annual meeting, chaired by the Prime Minister, between Secretaries of State and charity leaders. In this meeting, civil society leaders should be expected to represent the views of the wider sector, and be clear about how they have gathered views from the sector.
  • In each department, a Director should be responsible for involving a diverse range of charities, and required to report progress to this meeting.
  • Appoint a Non-Executive Director with a civil society background in each department.

These changes would provide a positive avenue of communication and set a clear tone, but are not sufficient on their own. However, these steps would make clear this Government’s intention to work more closely with civil society, and buy goodwill on both sides while longer-term changes are made.

Deeper mechanisms

  1. Facilitate and catalyse partnerships from the centre

The Future Governance Forum has previously recommended a central ‘partnerships hub’ based in the newly formed Mission Delivery Unit (MDU) in the Cabinet Office. The partnership hub would be designed both to catalyse engagement with government, and to raise the bar on stakeholder engagement by promoting best practice across Whitehall. The hub would not be responsible for all engagement activity itself, but would instead act as both a co-ordinating and enabling function, and to assist in embedding partnerships with civil society across government.

The hub should also help to create a test and learn culture, encouraging departments to monitor, evaluate and shift their approach accordingly. This could be achieved through collaboration between the Missions Delivery Unit and the Evaluation Taskforce hosted by HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office, as outlined in Recommendation 5 of Mission Critical 02.[1]

  1. Involve civil society throughout the policy development lifecycle

Civil society organisations are an essential partner in the development of good government policy due to their direct relationship with communities and their perspectives and ability to provide real-time feedback on the impact of government decision-making on the ground.

As a result, civil society should be represented in decision-making throughout the lifecycle of policy development, as part of the thinking and process of deciding what recommendations are put before Ministers and not siloed in separate ‘engagement’ processes. Ultimately, civil servants will and should be the first and main source of advice for Ministers, but it should be more explicitly expected that those civil servants understand the views and positions of different communities that civil society represents or works with while providing that advice.

The Missions Delivery Unit should revive previous attempts by government to make policy making ‘open by default’[2] through:

  • Supporting Departments and Ministerial teams to diversify the ways they make policy decisions, and the advice they receive. The Mission Delivery unit should re-invigorate, update and promote the use of the Open Policy Making Toolkit (published by the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs in 2016[3]), expanding its relevance and take-up of its recommendations and techniques.
  • Explicitly using pre-legislative scrutiny by Select Committees, robust consultations, and responding to informed parliamentary scrutiny as mechanisms through which the views and expertise of civil society and other relevant experts are brought into the policymaking process.
  • Formal consultation is foundational, but should sit alongside day-to-day, informal engagement. Space to talk without an agenda enables organisations to raise what they are observing which may not yet be on the radar of the government.
  • Including consideration of external engagement within written submissions to Ministers which documents the views of civil society stakeholders and subsequent actions taken.
  • Professionalising relationship management practice to build partnerships with civil society which are led by the organisation rather than reliant on individuals, to mitigate against inevitable churn within the system.
  1. Shift the culture of engagement to embrace disagreement in the interests of better policy development and decision-making

Hesitancy about external engagement, which has intensified over time, has been driven by an increasingly politicised view by a relatively small but influential group of MPs and previous Ministers. This has resulted in an ever inwardly focused civil service, regardless of individual civil servant’s or policy teams’ desire to work with civil society.

While this has been driven by political concerns, some of this fear has also been rooted in a fear of information leaking or losing control of the narrative. This risk is inherent in the relationship but is outweighed by the considerable benefit of civil society insight and expertise in difficult policy areas.

The whole system therefore needs to be better able to cope with differences of opinion:

  • Ministers and civil servants must accept the dual role of civil society organisations in both contributing advice and delivering specialist services based on their expertise, and holding government to account publicly. Civil society organisations can be contractors for central or local government, delivering services on their behalf, without sacrificing their independence. Politicians need to lead from the front and maintain relationships with organisations which publicly disagree with them, not restrict the information available to those organisations when their public positions on issues differ from those of the government.
  • Civil society organisations should keep the trust of civil servants and politicians where it is given, and be able to engage with the political realities and practical constraints that politicians and civil servants face.
  • There must be an explicit understanding throughout the policy and decision-making process that political risk cannot be shared. If a project does not comply with the law, does not represent value for money or fails to deliver, it is the politician who is ultimately accountable to the electorate. Being open about that in the course of building and working in partnership means everyone can be more honest, and shared challenges can be ‘put in the centre of the room’.
  1. Strengthen expertise on civil society across the civil service 

The civil service must be equipped with the dynamic capabilities and sector-specific knowledge it needs to cultivate effective partnerships and drive mission delivery. While increasing diversity has been a priority in the civil service for quite some time, the civil service remains (particularly at senior levels and within particular departments) largely unreflective of the communities it serves, in terms of ethnicity and socio-economic background in particular.

This can create a class- and culture-clash when the civil service reaches out to communities and works with civil society organisations. All of this supports the need for culture change, to make it easier for civil servants to engage at a point where they do not have all or any of the answers.

  • Bring collaborative skills and engagement with external organisations into the Civil Service Learning and Development framework to support officials across the hierarchy to reach out to relevant areas of civil society. This would acknowledge that collaboration requires a set of specific skills including active and empathetic listening; and receiving feedback and navigating difference; and communicating clearly. Bringing collaborative skills and engagement with external organisations into the Civil Service Learning and Development framework would support officials at all levels to reach out to relevant areas of civil society.
  • Establish a ‘Missions Secondment Programme’ to develop greater porosity within the system by both bringing external talent into Whitehall across the hierarchy at a variety of different levels of seniority, and working with civil society organisations to develop opportunities for civil servants to gain experience and build relationships with other sectors through placements (or more informal arrangements) within civil society organisations.
  • There is good practice, for example in the homelessness sector, where higher levels of interchange between the civil service, local government and service delivery organisations has improved levels of understanding of the constraints on each throughout their workforces.
  • Include external engagement within performance appraisal arrangements for civil servants, including the senior civil servants responsible. For example, a complete lack of engagement outside the civil service could trigger the performance management policy procedures for anyone in a relevant role, including senior civil servants.
  • Provide greater transparency of roles and responsibilities within government departments (while still safeguarding the identities of junior civil servants) to ensure that civil society organisations can make contact with the appropriate teams.

[1] Mission-Critical-02-Governing-in-partnership-with-Business-and-Trade-Unions-.pdf

[2] Civil Service Reform Plan (2012) & The new default: what can we learn from efforts to open up policy making | Institute for Government

[3] Open Policy Making toolkit – Guidance – GOV.UK

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Conclusion

Civil society has a unique insight, with direct knowledge of communities and people. There are numerous topics about which civil society can improve policy making, and provide insights about the needs of communities. The Covenant provides an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between government and civil society, and this is essential if government want to achieve their 5 missions. This will require Ministers and civil servants to be comfortable with the fact that civil society organisations can carry out several roles simultaneously: advisor, public critic, and deliverer of services.

This Consultation Response sets out mechanisms that can be used to ensure that the Covenant’s Principles translate into a tangible difference in how policy is made. Fundamentally, these recommendations are about how the civil service can open up the policymaking process, and make the most of the insight, innovation, expertise and challenge that civil society can provide.

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About

About The Future Governance Forum (FGF)

The Future Governance Forum (FGF) is a progressive, non-profit and non-partisan think tank, aiming to provide the intellectual and practical infrastructure vital to national renewal and the promotion of effective, progressive government in the UK. Our goal is to shape a comprehensive new operating model for the way the country works, delivering effectively across national, devolved, regional and local government. We bring together people and institutions with the expertise to develop and implement new models of partnership, policy development and service delivery.

About NPC (New Philanthropy Capital)

NPC (New Philanthropy Capital) is the think tank and consultancy for the social sector, dedicated to improving its impact. Our mission is to help charities, foundations, philanthropists, impact investors, social enterprises, businesses, and the public sector to maximise social impact in the lives of the people they serve.

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